While the Parenting Success Network works to hire another full-time blogger for this site, members of the Parenting Education staff at LBCC are going to be “guest blogging”. This week’s guest blogger is LeAnne Trask, the Pollywog Database and Social Media Coordinator. LeAnne and her husband, Terry, are the parents of three college-age sons.

As a young mom, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a “plan” for raising my children. What did I want them to grow up knowing? What did I want them to believe? What skills were they going to need? What kind of things did my kids need to be prepared for? What kind of Mom was I going to be?

Then, one day, I overhead a woman in my office talking about a “list” that her sister had created for each of her children. I LOVE lists, and I barraged her with questions about this list. A few days later, her sister called our office and my co-worker handed me the phone, and I introduced myself to Carol. I asked her to tell me about her lists, and Carol explained that she believed that there were things that her children needed to know, needed to be able to do, needed to be sure about, before they left her home–just like I did! I asked for examples. Carol said that she believed that each of her children should play a musical instrument–well. She wanted her son to be an Eagle Scout. She wanted each of her children to find a sport that they loved, and be good at it. She wanted her children to be able to cook a breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner–well. She wanted her children to be able to sew, and not just a button! Carol told me many more things that she had on her lists, and I took lots of notes.

What a great gift Carol gave me! When an experienced mother shares her thoughts with a new mother, it gives us “fresh eyes” for looking at our situation and setting our goals. Her idea of using a to-do list for each of her kids was perfect for me because I was already a list-maker. One of the beauties of using this strategy is that list-making gives back a sense of control, plus there is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in crossing things off your list.

I went home that night, and I started creating lists for each of my sons. Over the years, things have been added to those lists, and a few things removed from the lists, but overall, they were the game plan we used to raise our children. I took some of the things that Carol had on her list, like the importance of being an Eagle Scout and learning a musical instrument, and I added things that were personal to me, like attending Church regularly and participating in service projects. Learning to cook became a way of life at our house, and all of my sons know how to change their oil and tie a necktie!

Over the years, many mothers have given me advice and shared their experiences–good and bad–and I am grateful for every one of those shared experiences. I feel like we gave our kids not just a home and a place to hang their hat, but the benefit of our experience and the best of our knowledge. My hope is that we turned out kids that were as prepared for life as we could make them.

This is my final post for the Parenting Tips blog at Parenting Success Network.

I have been writing to you more or less every week for the last four years. During that time I have enjoyed sharing my evolving challenges with chores and bedtime, my intimations of mortality, and just my straight-up posts about Star Wars.

I appreciate all those who have commented, either here or on that popular social media platform, what’s-its-name. I am grateful for our wonderful guest contributors, who have enriched and diversified my offerings while enabling me to get paid while essentially doing nothing. And the push to write on the regular has been especially valuable, especially since frankly I’m not always feelin’ it. Because here’s the thing: once I get started I’m always glad I did it. I guess there’s a lesson there, or whatever.

It has been a fun four years. Best wishes to the Network and to future blog maestra/os.

It is Oregon’s Summer Meals program, and in this time of uncertainty and crisis I believe it’s one of the few things around that’s just purely good.

It might seem like I’m hyperbolizing (or, more likely, just inventing an excuse to use that word in a sentence), but I tell you it’s true. Why, take a gander if you will at the organization’s handsome and generous website, which provides an overview of the service and a tidy history as well as a sweet site locator to find meals around the state.

What do they do? Well, since it was created thanks to an act of Congress (remember those?) exactly 50 years ago, the USDA-funded program simply gives out free meals to children aged 1-18. Some sites also sell meals to adults, and some offer activities and educational opportunities before or after. That’s it.

Why is that magic? The awesomeness is in the details: how many public programs can you think of that don’t ask you to register your kids, or meet eligibility requirements, or sign up for further something-or-other, or commit to anything? Really! You just show up and they feed your kids. The end. No follow up, no stigma around needing the assistance. I think that’s mighty special.

My kids, who eat a lot and are sometimes in need of assistance, have enjoyed free meals in parks and libraries around Linn and Benton Counties. They’re not picky or anything, but they have pronounced the offerings both varied and pleasing. I believe them.

If you have kids, and a finite amount of financial resources, and/or it’s just too cockadoodle hot to make lunch, I suggest you check out the Summer Meals sitch. Here’s some nice pointers from our own Parenting Success Network.

“It takes 30 days to form a habit.” It’s always somehow shocking to me when these cliches turn out to be more or less true, as if the truthiness (thank you Stephen Colbert) rubs off in the repetition. But what if it’s backed by science? Turns out the facts are more complicated (AGAIN). Certainly too much so to comfortably aphorise.

So let’s put this another way: “It takes 66 days to form a habit. Or broadly, 18 to 254.” Doesn’t trip off the tongue, does it?

Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t bother to do this research before I started forming my new exercise habit. Because I was going by the 30 day thing.

Let me back up a little bit. I just turned 45 and I was thinking about, like, mortality, and things. In my parent-mind, I was thinking about how nice it would be to still be around when all my kids were doing grownup things and thinking about their mortality, and things.

Related to that thought was the one about how well I’ve modeled literacy and learning for my kids at the expense of other things like movement, sport (in the phenomenological sense), and exercise. Sure, we like to take hikes and go for walks, but that’s more about being in nature. And they do love to swim. So. But I have not prioritized those things, and I want to turn that around.

My brilliant wife is right on board, and has instituted a morning walking/jogging regimen for the girls, supplemented by yoga and frequent trips to the pool. It’s going…okay. And by okay, I mean that about half the kids are into it on any given day. Granted, it hasn’t been 30 days, much less 254.

As in all things parental, I had to start with me (we fill our own cup so that we can yada yada). As much as I cherished my morning ritual of making coffee and reading on the couch with a pointy cat on my lap, I knew I had to get moving. My aforementioned wife–the brilliant one–got me some workout clothes for Christmas (I HAVE NEVER OWNED workout clothes). I visualized myself waking up, suiting up, and heading out for an early morning jog, frost, rain and snails be darned (really, tried to be careful of the snails though).

I kept visualizing it every day as I made my coffee and sat down on the couch with coffee and a pointy cat, trying not to look in the direction of my workout clothes, which were balled up in a corner.

Finally I tried another way. Less ambitious, more…tiny. In this case, doing some research would have been helpful because I would have found something like this.

What I did was this: I got a gym bag. I put my workout clothes inside. I left the bag on the dining table when I went to bed. When I got up in the morning, I saw it there, taunting me like Mickey.

After a few days, I opened the bag and put the clothes on. And once I had done that, it just seemed silly not to go outside.

And the rest is…ongoing. Every morning, I put on the clothes and head out for a brisk walk. When I return, in 20-30 minutes, I feel awake and ready for the day. And also ready to do things like bend over and walk up stairs without wheezing.

My kids have noticed all these things. After (insert number of days here), it becomes just something that is done in our family.

So this summer I’ve decided to try to read as many of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels as I can (there are six, the first three of which are regarded as classics, plus around a billion written by his son, Brian Herbert, from notes he found in his dad’s garage). I’ve been trying to get through the first book since I was in fifth grade and the bizarre and not too successful movie adaptation came out. A couple years ago, I made it halfway through on Kindle (on my phone, which is pretty impressive). This time I’m ready.

Why am I telling you this, other than the fact that I haven’t talked about painfully nerdy stuff for several weeks now? Well, Dune was published in 1965 and was critically and commercially successful enough to have turned a lot of people on to its (at the time) radical concepts of planetary ecology; the idea that we need to pull back and pay attention to the world as a whole, because everything is connected. On the desert planet of Arrakis, the survival of its inhabitants–and by extension, the galaxy, because plot points–depends on their ability to take this holistic view.

Clearly this is something we need to do here, now. As on Arrakis, the summer on Earth is again displaying record temperatures, along with drought, wildfires and unprecedented heat-related deaths. The macro is coming back to haunt the micro (which is us. We’re the micro).

As I read about the characters in Dune trying to survive the alien desert with its extreme lack of moisture, I keep seeing warnings about the heat wave coming to us here in the Willamette Valley this week. I wanted to reiterate the warning and share some tips on how to prepare for the coming heat.

According to the highly diverting Department of Homeland Security website Ready.gov (which also contains helpful hints about tsunamis, shooters, pandemics and nuclear explosions but not, sadly, zombies), here are the basics:

If your home is not air conditioned, find places to go that are. Work in a state office, like me! Or, go to the public library, the mall, anywhere you can spend some time safely during the hottest hours.

Drink lots of water. Like seriously. You know you don’t drink enough as it is. Drink water before you feel you need to, because in this kind of weather you are already dehydrated if you feel thirsty.

DO NOT leave pets or children in an enclosed car. We know that, right? It goes triple this week. Check frequently on children and elderly. Make sure your neighbors are prepared.

Eat popsicles. Not on the website, but that’s because I think it was scrubbed by the incoming administration.

It’s science time at the Parenting Success Network blog. That’s right: that means it’s time to take to the internet and google (it’s what we used to do before we started talking to Siri, but after we went to the library and pulled out the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature) “parenting.”

Wikipedia, just below it, defines “parenting” according to the democratic will of the (internet-abled) human race: “Parenting or child rearing is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the intricacies of raising a child aside from the biological relationship.” This is an accurate and utterly uninteresting encapsulation. More intriguingly, however, it goes on to say:

“Parenting styles vary by historical time period, race/ethnicity, social class, and other social features. Additionally, research has supported that parental history both in terms of attachments of varying quality as well as parental psychopathology, particularly in the wake of adverse experiences, can strongly influence parental sensitivity and child outcomes.”

Okay. So in other words, the quality of parenting depends on a lot of different things. What were we born with? What have we lived through, and what did we take with us? How many other things get our attention, energy, concentrated will? No wonder there are so many parenting blogs. Sheesh.

Most interesting, though, are the questions that those who come before us have asked; the search engine equivalent to the stones cast at the feet of the Omphalos of Delphi (a situation I may have just completely made up). Here are some of the top questions:

“What is a bad parent?”

This one kind of breaks my heart, not only because I don’t like to think about how bad my parenting is, but because I picture someone typing this question into the search field after having been accused of being one. A better question: “What is a good parent?” It goes back to that thing about the google bubble.

“What does it mean to be a parent?”

This is a good question, because it could be practical or purely philosophical. Clicking through brings up that pesky Wikipedia entry as well as one from, randomly, The Ministry of Education in Guyana.

Later, as verbal and logical functioning revs up to higher levels, more sophisticated jokes, based on discrepancies between facts and perceptions, come into play.

I knew a 10 year-old who found this joke so brilliant she repeated it with maddening regularity: “Two muffins were sitting in an oven. One said, ‘Is it getting hot in here?’ The other said, ‘Oh my god! It’s a talking muffin!'” That one stayed funny for a while.

Now in my house we’re going meta, discussing joke mechanics.

And just last week my oldest, now 13, left a note for my on top of the dinner dishes:

This week’s post is by guest contributor Jessica Magnani, who compiled this information on free and low-cost Summer events for families in Albany. Last week she gave us activities in Corvallis. Thanks again, Jessica!

While most of Oregon Farmers’ markets accept SNAP benefits, many also offer a matching program, which doubles SNAP purchases dollar for dollar up to a certain amount — meaning you could get $10 worth of food for only $5 from your SNAP account.

Come play and celebrate community at the annual Penny Carnival! It’s just pennies to play! We’ll have music, wacky relays, old fashioned carnival games and much more! Buy a bundle of tickets for 25 cents each at the event and each activity costs 1 ticket! Concessions available for additional fees.

Movie Night at Avery Park

Thursday, August 16, 2018 –

5:00pm to 10:00pm

Enjoy an outdoor cinema experience with family and friends under the stars in beautiful Avery Park. All ages welcome!

Chintimini BBQ & Music in the Park

Celebrate summer with a community cookout, games and great music by local folk singer Cassandra Robertson! Cassandra is a local favorite whose original melodies are meant to inspire us to dream of a future that works for all!

The live music will be a great accompaniment to the burgers,chicken and hot dogs coming off the grill, plus potato salad,fruit salad, and dessert! Vegetarian options available upon request.

All ages welcome!

Chintimini Senior & Community Center

2601 NW Tyler Ave

Friday, August 17, 4 – 7 pm
Tickets: $8 per person

Hiking & Parks

Fitton Green: 980 NW Panorama Drive Corvallis, OR 97330

Central Park: 650 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis, OR

Chip Ross: NW Lester Ave, Corvallis, OR 97330

Bald Hill: 375 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis, OR 97330

Finley Park: 26208 Finley Refuge Rd, Corvallis, OR

Peavy Arboretum: NW Peavy Arboretum Rd, Corvallis, OR 97330

Siuslaw Forest: 3200 SW Jefferson Way, Corvallis, OR 97331

Avery Park: SW Avery Park Dr, Corvallis, OR 97333

Jackson Frazier Wetlands: 3460 NE Canterbury Cir, Corvallis, OR 97330

Beginning Reading Programs on Campus

4 years old & Entering Kindergarteners: In this fun summer program, your child will learn how to read! Children will learnletter recognition, beginning phonics, and easy sight words!

After some reminders about the importance of self-care (including one from Parenting Success Network boss Aoife Magee), I was thinking about some of the things I’ve been trying to do for myself. As I have written–and said–countless times, we can’t fill someone else’s cup unless we have filled our own.

In case this image is not clear enough (or if you still consider your cup to be half empty), imagine sitting next to your child on an airplane. If God forbid there should be an emergency and the oxygen masks come down, whose will you attach first? If you answered “your own,” you are in the company of the approximately 2/3 of respondents I just made up. Our instinct is to meet the child’s needs before your own, so it’s natural to want to put their mask on first. However, it’s also the wrong choice. Because if something goes wrong you need to be able to help, and you can’t help if you can’t breathe.

So there. How does this apply to the day-to-day? Without plane crashes and such?

I remembered that I hadn’t told you about my new car. New to me, anyway. It’s a 1993 Toyota Tercel, and it’s pretty much so uncool that it comes back around to cool again. To say it is an improvement on my previous car, a Volvo that could allegedly not be repaired following a crash into a curb one icy day because the company no longer made the parts. I took to calling it The Death Car and refused to take on passengers unless absolutely necessary, believing it would someday kill me, Christine-style.

Thankfully, this did not happen. It did not happen because I finally resolved to replace it and finally bought the Tercel from a mechanically inclined friend who had driven it for years before passing it down to adult daughters. The Volvo I donated to my workplace, using the great company V-DAC, for which they netted $25. Sorry, workplace!

Anyway, the point of this story is that once I decided to focus time and energy (and a surprisingly small amount of money) on my own needs, namely a reliable commuter car capable of more than 8 miles per gallon, I was able to shrug off a huge burden of shame and anxiety that was interfering with my ability to parent.

Am I recommending that you go out and buy a new car, for parenting purposes? Sure, I guess. But wait, there’s more. The Tercel is a manual transmission, something I hadn’t driven in about 20 years (ask me about that someday). I have been rediscovering the joys of riding up a learning curve. Between practicing driving a stick (thanks once again to the mighty Art of Manliness blog) and taking as many different routes to and from work as I can (thanks to decent mileage), I’m keeping my brain healthy and burning some new neural pathways. And that’s a good way to fill your cup.